I live with my Mom and Dad and their weimaraner "Spencer". My Dad has multi infarct dementia

We all come from Vermont and we grew up during the 60's and 70's. One of our favorite things is cooking and so we try and stay sane by writing about cooking. I have an old cookbook from Rutland VT called "Out of Vermont Kitchens that we are going to try and cook from and see what the food tastes like.

The cookbook has some prepared foods in some of the recipes. But we will try and adapt them perhaps to modern cusine.

We also try other recipes but will dive into our Vermont roots as often as we can.

Marion Ballou Smith
The daughter of Orris and Margaret (Mageen) Ballou, Marion Ballou Smith grew up in Rutland, Vermont, graduated from Mount Holyoke College (1914), and taught botany and mathematics. In 1927 she married Esme A.C. Smith, a businessman in Rutland. Active in local business and civic affairs, Smith was the co-compiler, with Alice Chaffee Bowker and Ruth Sutton, of a fund-raising cookbook entitled Out of Vermont Kitchens, published in 1939, to benefit the Trinity Mission of Trinity Church in Rutland, and the Women's Service League of St. Paul's Church in Burlington, Vermont.

3.09.2010

Getting Ready for Spring and Summer

I'm starting to look forward to Spring and all the projects I have planned. I got a small babysitting job until the end of school getting two boys to school on time. I'm going to buy some fencing with the babysitting money and set up some pens for the chickens. I just can't free range them because of stray dogs and hawks. Also want to get a truckload of top soil to surround the garden and create some flower bed borders that will help deter pesky bugs.

I've been studying temporary fencing made from plastic. Although its only good for 10 years, it'll hopefully help me rotate the chicken pasture and keep them in fresh grass.

I stopped in Ithaca last week for a visit and some shopping. I bought some lemon grass that I'll sprout and plant. The lemon grass makes a great landscaping bush during the summer and you can harvest it in the Fall and freeze the stalks for Asian cooking. You just stick them in water until they have rooted and then plonk them into pots until the warm weather allows outside planting. Right now, in a big vase with glass beads at the bottom, the bouquet of lemon grass looks like some crazy window display.

I've begun planting peppers and eggplants upstairs near the big window. I've never had a much luck with eggplants from seed. Eggplants have to be the slowest of all plants to get started, but I love baba ganuj and like any addict, I just keep trying.

I am going to buy some portable fencing soon for both the chickens and possibly to extend the garden a bit more. Not sure how the garden will go this year with my Dad's illness. I've bought multiple packets of greens and lettuces from Johnny's Seeds and I'll start thinking about getting my Farmers Market gig going again. I'll bag mixed greens and lettuce that sold very well last year when I had a stall at the Bath Farmers Market. Its a ton of work to get up at 4 am and cut wash and bag greens but satisfying. People liked the bagged greens and I had a small group of people who bought from me each week.

So I'll start planning the garden, begin working on the chicken coop extension and think about all the other summer work I'm now going to have to do. Mowing the lawn, bush-hogging the field, trimming, fixing the rock walls and keeping the pond clean and weed whacked.

Its going to be a very busy summer.
Posted by Kimberly at 4:59 PM

1 comment:

Matt Sutkoski said...

It's always great to anticipate the gardening season. I look out the window each day to see how much snow has eroded from the garden.
It got warm enough the other day for me to sit in the sun and browse my Johnny's Seed catalog.
You sound a lot more ambitious than me, so kudos to you.
Here's hoping you have a terrific growing season, Kim!

March 11, 2010 at 7:13 AM

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